think that with it the moral standard is rising. Our people are becoming more temperate, and they are insisting on a higher standard of living. They will go further, so the evidence seems to indicate, if they are well led.

I

For the training of the necessary leaders the Higher Education is essential, and the Universities are its only reliable source. One of the satisfactory features of our time is the large increase in the number of our Universities within the last ten years, and the generous endowment of them from private sources. That the State ought to do more than it does in the way of endowment agree with the writer of this book. But I am not sure that I wish to see the burden transferred to the State in the wholesale fashion that is sometimes suggested. In expenditure out of taxes science is as essential as in the arts and crafts to which these Essays and Addresses refer. Probably nothing conduces more to national efficiency than frugality in the use of national resources. The private donor should be encouraged and not left to expend his generosity in regions which do not concern the State directly. In writing this I do not mean that the Government ought not to spend public money generously upon the Universities. I mean that it should not be spent unless and until a case for the necessity of such expenditure has been clearly made out.

There has been too much waste in the past over some matters connected with education, and, as the result, too much starvation over others, to make this warning superfluous. No one who has had to do with the business of Government can fail to have felt the pang of regret at the discovery that precipitate expenditure in the past, which events have shown to be misplaced, has deprived him of the money necessary to effect necessary reforms. Festina lente is a good maxim for a Chancellor of the Exchequer. He must remember

both the words of the maxim.

With this preliminary word of caution I associate myself enthusiastically with the endeavour of my colleague in the British Science Guild. There is a saying of a recent writer which I will quote as expressing the pith and marrow of what Sir Norman Lockyer and others of us desire to preach as our gospel :-" Vom Wissen Zu Können ist immer ein Sprung; der Sprung aber ist vom Wissen und nicht vom Nicht-Wissen."

R. B. HALDANE.

PREFACE.

I have brought together in the present volume several among my Essays and Addresses on educational subjects which have appeared during the last thirty-five years.

In these I endeavoured to show how vital it is, from a national point of view, that the education of everybody, from prince to peasant, should be based upon a study of things and causes and effects as well as of words, and that no training of the mind is complete which does not make it capable of following and taking advantage of the workings of natural law which dominate all human activities.

My point has in all cases been that the nation most highly educated in this manner can, if the number of combatants be equal, best hold its own in the struggle for existence both in peace and war, seeing that success in either now depends not upon muscle but upon the utilisation of the best and most numerous applications of science. If the number of combatants is unequal, then the smaller number can only hold its own if it be much more highly educated than its opponent.

The present position of Britain from this point of view shows that those of us who have endeavoured for the last thirty-five years to point out the way in which our people can survive in the struggle, have, to a large extent, been crying in the wilderness. In spite of what

has been done during the last ten years, instead o a relative advance there is still a relative decline in relation to other countries. The United States and Germany now have greater populations than ourselves and at the same time the best and most complete education, science and research, are there fully fostered, while they are practically left uncared for by the British Government.

If this goes on there can only be one result, which cannot be evaded even by the close welding together, be it sympathetic, fiscal or political, of all the British people beyond the seas, unless the greater population is at the same time furnished with greater brain-power than that of the competing nations.

This will not be until the British and Colonial Governments change their attitude towards science and the higher instruction. Largely increased endowments of the higher education and research, and the utilisation of scientific methods in all branches of the administration, equal to those at the disposal of competing nations, can alone save us.

Strenuous efforts should be made to apply these remedies at once; if delayed they may be too late. I have to thank Mr. Haldane, who among other things is the President of the Science Guild, for the honour he has done the book by writing an introduction.

November, 1906.

NORMAN LOCKYER.